Trending Tags

Follow

About Michael J. Miller

Miller, who was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine from 1991 to 2005, authors this blog for PC Magazine to share his thoughts on PC-related products. No investment advice is offered in this blog. All duties are disclaimed. Miller works separately for a private investment firm which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

Nvidia Joins 28nm Graphics Race with "Kepler" Architecture

As expected, Nvidia today announced its entrantance into the 28nm graphics market. The unveiled family of desktop and mobile chips promises to be twice as efficient as its earlier 40nm architecture and deliver better graphics performance and smoother visuals.

The new chips, which use an architecture known as "Kepler" will be sold as GeForce GTX 680 for desktops and as the GT 600 family for notebooks. Nvidia will compete with AMD's recently announced "Southern Islands" 28nm chips, starting with the high-end Radeon 7970, which has been shipping for a few months.

Nvidia says the new system will be the fastest and most power-efficient GPU ever built. The GTX 680 desktop version has 192 CUDA graphics cores in each of its SMX blocks (which combine control logic and the rendering cores) and has eight blocks for a total of 1,536 graphics cores, rendering units, compared with the 512 cores in the 40nm GTX 580, based on the "Fermi" architecture.

In addition, it requires only 195 watts of power, compared with the 250 watts required by the GTX 580 and by AMD's 7970 card. This lets it draw less power and create less noise while still producing more performance. Each GPU can support up to four displays from a single GPU, and can now run three monitors in 3D vision surround from a single GPU (versus two GPUs required in the previous generation).

The new cards also add what Nvidia is calling fast approximate anti-aliasing (FXAA) and temporal anti-aliasing (TXAA). It improves anti-aliasing quality and speed and is designed to reduce stuttering and improve the visual impacts, as well as Nvidia's 3D and PhysX technologies. It also has support for multiple GPUs for most of the high-end games.

One difference is that now there are more cores but they all share a single clock, as opposed to using a double clock with fewer cores in the previous generation. This makes it more power-efficient, says Justin Walker, a senior GeForce product manager. In addition, it now uses a technique called "GPU boost," which lets all of the cores increase in speed when the chip has extra headroom. The basic clock runs at 1006 MHz as a minimum, with boost at 1058 MHz.

Walker said that Epic's "Samaritan" demo required three GTX 580s to run at last year's Game Developers Conference, but at this year's conference it could run on a single GTX 680.

The basic card, with 2GB of 256-bit DDR5 memory, will carry a suggested retail price of $499. Partners may offer overclocked versions.

In addition, Nvidia launched its GeForce GT 600 family of notebook processors, specifically the GT 640M, based on the same overall architecture. Nvidia said this should enable lighter, slimmer notebooks with discrete graphics that still get great battery life. In particular, the company compared the Acer Timeline Ultra M3 with the GT 640M—a five pound, 20mm thick notebook designed to get eight hours of battery life—with a year-old Alienware laptop from that has the same graphics performance but weighed eight pounds, was 50mm thick, and only got three hours of battery life.

In the notebook space, Nvidia stressed how its discrete graphics chips could play all of the popular games at high frame rates. The 640M should be in the middle of the notebook graphics line, with other chips ranging from the low-end 620M to the high-end GTX 675M.

The new GeForce lines will face off against AMD's Radeon graphics family, and I'll leave it to others to do the benchmarks once the boards and notebooks really ship. Both companies will be also be touting how much better discrete graphics play games than integrated graphics do, specifically targeting Intel's current Sandy Bridge and upcoming Ivy Bridge CPUs. We'll better be able to compare this when Ivy Bridge finally ships, now expected to start late next month.

Automatic Renewal Program: Your subscription will continue without interruption for as long as you wish, unless
you instruct us otherwise. Your subscription will automatically renew at the end of the term unless you authorize
cancellation. Each year, you'll receive a notice and you authorize that your credit/debit card will be charged the
annual subscription rate(s). You may cancel at any time during your subscription and receive a full refund on all
unsent issues. If your credit/debit card or other billing method can not be charged, we will bill you directly instead. Contact Customer Service